The present invention relates generally to hay balers, and more particularly to an improved wind guard system for the crop pickup and stuffer assembly of a round baler.
For many years agricultural balers have been used to consolidate and package crop material so as to facilitate the storage and handling of the crop material for later use. Usually, a mower-conditioner cuts and conditions the crop material for windrow drying in the sun. When the cut crop material is properly dried, a baler, most likely a round baler, is pulled along the windrows to pick up the crop material and form it into cylindrically-shaped round bales. More specifically, the pickup of the baler gathers the cut and windrowed crop material from the ground. The pickup assembly then conveys the cut crop material with a conveyor, such as a rotating conveying rotor, into a bale-forming chamber within the baler. The pickup assembly has a drive mechanism that operates to activate both the pickup and the conveying rotor, and the pickup drive mechanism is operably connected to and driven by the main drive mechanism of the baler. The baling chamber consists of a pair of opposing sidewalls with a series of belts that rotate and compress the crop material into a cylindrical shape. When the bale has achieved a desired size and density, the operator wraps the bale to ensure that the bale maintains its shape and density. The operator raises the tailgate of the baler and ejects the bale onto the ground. The tailgate is then closed and the cycle repeated as necessary and desired to manage the field of cut crop material.
The rotor conveyor mechanism (“rotor” or “rotor mechanism”) between the pickup and the bale-forming chamber is, itself, known in the prior art, as shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,595,055 and 6,644,006. The rotor mechanism is usually referred to as the “stuffer”, because it stuffs the crop material into the gap between the floor roll and the starter roll into the bale-forming chamber.
It has been customary to provide the pickup mechanism with a lower wind guard which pivots and floats to hold down the hay or other crop material as it is being fed rearwardly to prevent the crop material from being blown off the pickup floor and to ensure an adequate compaction of the crop material for good feeding into the stuffer mechanism. Additionally, a separate wind guard is sometimes included above the stuffer assembly; however, this wind guard pivots only, without floating. The pivot point of known upper wind guards is positioned well above the stuffer assembly to allow large slugs of crop to pass underneath. With this high pivot position, the wind guard often fails to keep the crop compressed when under normal crop flow. When the crop is not compressed as it enters the bale-forming chamber, difficulties in starting a bale can occur.
Conventional wind guards are fairly simple structures, and include an elongated pipe-like member, often referred to as a wind guard pipe, extending across the front of the pickup mechanism with a plurality of tines attached to the wind guard pipe along its length extending rearwardly over the pickup mechanism. This type of wind guard may be manually adjusted for different sizes of windrows of crop material by positioning the wind guard pipe and the tines closer to the pickup mechanism for small windrows or farther away from the pickup mechanism for large windrows. If the wind guard is adjusted for small windrows and a large windrow is encountered, the wind guard pipe and tines may be too close to the pickup mechanism to accommodate the large windrow. This could cause plugging of the pickup mechanism. If the wind guard is adjusted for large windrows and a small windrow is encountered, the wind guard tines may be too far away from the pickup mechanism to protect the small windrow. This could result in wind loss of crop material, or, as mentioned above, difficulties in starting the bale core.
It would improve the operation of agricultural crop pickups if the problems identified above could be overcome.